Supercomputers/Systems/Magic Cube
China · operational · hpc
Magic Cube
Also known as Dawning 5000A
Operated by Shanghai Supercomputer Center at Shanghai Supercomputer Center .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 180.60 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 233.47 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 77.4%
- Cores
- 30,720
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Dawning | Sugon | - | Verified | top500.orginternetnews.com |
| CPU | AMD Opteron Quad-Core 1.9GHz CPUs x86-64 · 4C · 1.9 GHz Quad-Core Opteron 1.9GHz | AMD | - | Verified | top500.orginternetnews.com |
| Interconnect | Mellanox InfiniBand DDR Interconnect Fat tree · 20 Gb/s per 4x port · About 2 microseconds Infiniband DDR | NVIDIA | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | Windows HPC Server 2008 Operating systems Windows Server kernel with HPC Pack job scheduler · Commercial license Windows HPC 2008 | Microsoft | - | Verified | top500.orginternetnews.com |
The read
Sugon, branded Dawning at the time, built this Opteron cluster for the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, 11th on the November 2008 TOP500 and, at its debut, the first Chinese system ever to run the winning Linpack submission on Windows rather than Linux. 6,600-odd quad-core AMD Opteron processors at 1.9GHz on InfiniBand, 30,720 cores in all. Contemporary trade coverage independently confirms the vendor, the Opteron generation and the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system TOP500 records, and adds a detail no TOP500 field carries: 12 TB of system memory. TOP500 does not publish a power figure for this system, so none is recorded. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-22 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest; the Windows HPC Server 2008 entry in this dataset
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| internetnews.com | names system and part | AMD Opteron Quad-Core 1.9GHz, Mellanox InfiniBand DDR, Windows HPC Server 2008 |
| top500.org | names system and part | AMD Opteron Quad-Core 1.9GHz, Mellanox InfiniBand DDR, Windows HPC Server 2008 |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.